I know it isn’t politically correct to say this, and I know that, politically, it is definitely not the right time to say this, but I’m going to go ahead and say something I’ve been thinking for years and I’m going to say it right flat out, right here, right now:

I liked Oprah a lot better when she was fat and insecure.

About the time Oprah decided to lose weight (over and over again) she also realized that she had the answer to everything, and here’s the thing:

A lot of Oprah’s answers are just wrong.

Take the best-selling Law of Attraction missive The Secret. The Secret is one of the dumbest, most shallow ‘spirituality’ books I have ever seen.

First of all, The Secret isn’t so much an actual book as it is a hodgepodge of other people’s ideas taken out of context and printed up as a smattering of unrelated quotes, with medieval-ish page decorations added to make it all appear to be more profound. The Secret is more of a disorganized pep talk than it is a coherent theory for reaching goals. Most of the experts quoted in the book are those blue suit/red tie motivational speaker-types who promise to get you into a house on the Rivieria by making you do dorky group cheers and having you cut photos out of magazines and paste them to your hat.

Ick? I mean, seriously.

“But,” I can just hear you protesting, “Isn’t The Secret based on the for-real, age old spiritual principle that like attracts like?” It claims to be, yes. But The Secret actually boils down to two simple ideas from freshman psychology class that can be stated much more baldly without all the spiritual mumbo jumbo and hype.

1) It helps to set goals but most people never set any. In other words, you can’t get what you want if you don’t first figure out what you want, and…

2) Visual imagery precedes rational thought developmentally and cognitively, so if you focus on an image as part of your goal-setting process, you’ll start to unconsciously notice anything relating to that image in your daily life, more so than if you use words and ideas alone. Just noticing a specific thing you want then helps you to focus and refocus your attention until you finally reach your goal.

In short, it isn’t that you are attracting wonderful things to YOU, it’s more that you are directing your unconsious attention to the wonderful things. The world is filled with all sorts of things all the time, some wonderful and some less so, and we can direct our attention to some extent if we so choose.

But saying that directing our attention and using images as part of deliberate goal setting can be helpful and effective is a totally different thing from saying that we control these wonderful things and draw them to us by the power of our thoughts alone. We can direct our attention, but we don’t direct the world to suit our whims.

The belief that you can control the world with your thoughts is called psychosis. Worse, that now too-popular assertion has some very unpleasant implications if it is actually true (which it isn’t).

The ugliest implication of The Secret is that if it is true that you draw whatever you think about into your life, then nothing is ever not your fault. You totally create your own private universe. This control is absolute and is all about you and how you direct your attention. The world is just sitting there, inert, waiting to take your personal orders. If you don’t give the world the right orders and end up with some hideous disease and no Mercedes, then hey, whose fault is that?

Some people are so enamored of this idea they insist that you do indeed create your own universe. I’m here to tell you that you do not. You do not create your own reality. I don’t care how cool it sounds to say so.

I mean, come on. Get over yourself.

Disease, poverty, trauma, suffering—all these are things you can bring on yourself, but they are also things that can come into your life through no fault of your own for a variety of complex reasons that have nothing to do with your personal will at all. If you aren’t rich, it’s not necessarily your own fault. If you are rich, you can’t necessarily take every drop of the credit.

This self-aggrandizing philosophy may be comforting to a gazillionaire like Oprah who seems to go through periodic spasms of survivor guilt, but for the rest of us, it just creates the feeling that we deserve crummy lives, that we are spiritual subcreatures doomed to slog through suffering for no good reason except our own lack of manifestation skills.

Are the residents of Haiti suffering right now because they failed to imagine and ‘manifest’ a life full of good food and new swimming pools? Or are they suffering because 1) earthquakes happen, 2) their government is marginal and exploitive, and 3) the country is devoid of natural resources due to oppressive conditions laid down by France when Haitians bought their way out of slavery?

I’m just asking.

If the truly spiritual life is marked by great wealth and easy luxury, then why are the greatest spiritual figures of all time forever getting themselves crucified and tormented and in general just suffering horribly for the sake of others?

Maybe it is because a larger spiritual principle is that being present to what is, even when it involves suffering and feeling pain, is redemptive and transformative. Comfort is not, and denial and delusion are not all that helpful either.

Here’s the truth: Life is hard and then you die. Any fool with eyes can see this, and all the great spiritual teachers put this lesson in their earliest, most basic guidance. Life is hard and we can’t always change that, but along the way, we can choose to be compassionate and kind, or we can choose to pile up as many toys as possible and brag about it endlessly.

We do get to choose which matters more to us: fool’s gold, or real gold.

And that, for sure, is no secret.